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How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Relationship

Our style of attachment affects everything from our partner selection to how well our relationships progress to, sadly, how they end. That is why recognizing our attachment pattern can help us understand our strengths and vulnerabilities in a relationship. An attachment pattern is established in early childhood attachments and continues to function as a working model for relationships in adulthood.

This model of attachment influences how each of us reacts to our needs and how we go about getting them met. When there is a secure attachment pattern, a person is confident and self-possessed and is able to easily interact with others, meeting both their own and another’s needs. However, when there is an anxious or avoidant attachment pattern, and a person picks a partner who fits with that maladaptive pattern, he or she will most likely be choosing someone who isn’t the ideal choice to make him or her happy.

For example, the person with a working model of anxious/preoccupied attachment feels that, in order to get close to someone and have your needs met, you need to be with your partner all the time and get reassurance. To support this perception of reality, they choose someone who is isolated and hard to connect with. The person with a working model of dismissive/avoidant attachment has the tendency to be distant, because their model is that the way to get your needs met is to act like you don’t have any. He or she then chooses someone who is more possessive or overly demanding of attention.

In a sense, we set ourselves up by finding partners that confirm our models. If we grew up with an insecure attachment pattern, we may project or seek to duplicate similar patterns of relating as adults, even when these patterns hurt us and are not in our own self-interest.

In their research, Dr. Phillip Shaver and Dr. Cindy Hazan found that about 60 percent of people have a secure attachment, while 20 percent have an avoidant attachment, and 20 percent have an anxious attachment. So what does this mean? There are questions you can ask yourself to help you determine your style of attachment and how it is affecting your relationships. On August 13, I will be hosting a CE Webinar with Dr. Phillip Shaver on “Secure and Insecure Love: An Attachment Perspective.”You can start to identify your own attachment style by getting to know the four patterns of attachment in adults and learning how they commonly affect couples in their relating.

Secure Attachment – Securely attached adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships. Children with a secure attachment see their parent as a secure base from which they can venture out and independently explore the world. A secure adult has a similar relationship with their romantic partner, feeling secure and connected, while allowing themselves and their partner to move freely.

Secure adults offer support when their partner feels distressed. They also go to their partner for comfort when they themselves feel troubled. Their relationship tends to be honest, open and equal, with both people feeling independent, yet loving toward each other. Securely attached couples don’t tend to engage in what my father, psychologist Robert Firestone, describes as a “Fantasy Bond,” an illusion of connection that provides a false sense of safety. In a fantasy bond, a couple foregoes real acts of love for a more routine, emotionally cut-off form of relating.

Anxious Preoccupied Attachment – Unlike securely attached couples, people with an anxious attachment tend to be desperate to form a fantasy bond. Instead of feeling real love or trust toward their partner, they often feel emotional hunger. They’re frequently looking to their partner to rescue or complete them. Although they’re seeking a sense of safety and security by clinging to their partner, they take actions that push their partner away.

Even though anxiously attached individuals act desperate or insecure, more often than not, their behavior exacerbates their own fears. When they feel unsure of their partner’s feelings and unsafe in their relationship, they often become clingy, demanding or possessive toward their partner. They may also interpret independent actions by their partner as affirmation of their fears. For example, if their partner starts socializing more with friends, they may think, “See? He doesn’t really love me. This means he is going to leave me. I was right not to trust him.”

Dismissive Avoidant Attachment – People with a dismissive avoidant attachment have the tendency to emotionally distance themselves from their partner. They may seek isolation and feel “pseudo-independent,” taking on the role of parenting themselves. They often come off as focused on themselves and may be overly attending to their creature comforts.

Pseudo-independence is an illusion, as every human being needs connection. Nevertheless, people with a dismissive avoidant attachment tend to lead more inward lives, both denying the importance of loved ones and detaching easily from them. They are often psychologically defended and have the ability to shut down emotionally. Even in heated or emotional situations, they are able to turn off their feelings and not react. For example, if their partner is distressed and threatens to leave them, they would respond by saying, “I don’t care.”

Fearful Avoidant Attachment – A person with a fearful avoidant attachment lives in an ambivalent state, in which they are afraid of being both too close to or too distant from others. They attempt to keep their feelings at bay but are unable to. They can’t just avoid their anxiety or run away from their feelings. Instead, they are overwhelmed by their reactions and often experience emotional storms. They tend to be mixed up or unpredictable in their moods. They see their relationships from the working model that you need to go toward others to get your needs met, but if you get close to others, they will hurt you. In other words, the person they want to go to for safety is the same person they are frightened to be close to. As a result, they have no organized strategy for getting their needs met by others.

As adults, these individuals tend to find themselves in rocky or dramatic relationships, with many highs and lows. They often have fears of being abandoned but also struggle with being intimate. They may cling to their partner when they feel rejected, then feel trapped when they are close. Oftentimes, the timing seems to be off between them and their partner. A person with fearful avoidant attachment may even wind up in an abusive relationship.

The attachment style you developed as a child based on your relationship with a parent or early caretaker doesn’t have to define your ways of relating to those you love in your adult life. If you come to know your attachment style, you can uncover ways you are defending yourself from getting close and being emotionally connected and work toward forming an “earned secure attachment.”

You can challenge your defenses by choosing a partner with a secure attachment style, and work on developing yourself in that relationship. Therapy can also be helpful for changing maladaptive attachment patterns. By becoming aware of your attachment style, both you and your partner can challenge the insecurities and fears supported by your age-old working models and develop new styles of attachment for sustaining a satisfying, loving relationship.

Hi, good analysis. Almost all the humanbeings are oneway or other directly or indirectly connected with people and ended with more complication. You have clearly catogorically given 4 segments. It should be thought perfectly to the teenagers and youngsters to have lesser problems in finding thier partners. Hope this useful for all age group. Regards. Meena

How does one avoid becoming anxious/preoccupied? I also wonder if the symptoms can be the cause as well: for instance, constantly being around your partner elicits an eventual anxious/preoccupied attachment style, whereas before you were secure.

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Fair enough, you ranked me in the preoccupied-anxiety bit. Sure, I am both anxious and preoccupied with negative thoughts. Problem is, I have good reason to be. I am never clingy, I allow all the freedom one wants and I only have a single demand, truthfulness and honesty, which is NEVER met. Consequently, I enter relationships without any amount of preoccupation or anxiety because I just tend to take people at their word, and then see relationships end terribly because I was not clingy enough or too naive to notice things like cheating, lying and so forth. My son's father behaved like this, he even let me go through a pregnancy cause he wanted to "fuck free for 9 months" and that's a quote. And when he found out that the pregnancy and child changed me and that I was unhappy and depressed because of his affairs and his indifference, he kicked us out and got his minor girlfriend in. My last partner was a narcissist who put me down constantly and never felt a thing about me. So, yeah, I'm anxious and preoccupied. And it's got nothing to do with childhood. And right now I don't want anyone at all. I never even wanted a fairytale, just some real togetherness, someone I can love and who'd love me back. Care to explain this to me?

You might be interested in reading some of our other blogs that explain the pattern you seem to be talking about in terms of the partners you choose. I completely agree with you regarding honesty. You may also be interested in our book “Fear of Intimacy” or “Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships.” Here are links to some of the blogs:

I wrote a book called Create New Love: How Men and Women can Prepare for a Lasting Relationship, and a main focus of several chapters was how helpful it can be to assess your attachment style, and that of your dates so that you don't try to make a relationship work with someone very different from you. For example, a strong avoidant person with a highly anxious one is a set up for conflict and misery.

As a practicing Divorce Lawyer for many years and as an Marriage and Family Therapist Intern, I have found attachment research to really be helpful in understanding relationships and how people deal with the conflicts and loss associated with relationships. This is a great article.

Firstly I wanted to say this is a great article and has made a big impact on me. I feel I fall under the Fearful Avoidant attachment style as a lot of boxes were ticked for me in the description. Often I feel like I am riding a rollercoaster with my emotions unable to hide from them but also unable to decipher them. I have a fear of abandonment and being alone, however I can feel trapped, like an animal in a cage desperate to escape within my relationship.

My reason for commenting is I am eager to grow as a person and development in my relationship. I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources which I could use to develop my understanding and course of action?

I'd also fit fearful avoidant, I think, although I don't exactly feel trapped in a relationship - sometimes I do - more a feeling of fear. I tend to avoid emotional (and sometimes physical) intimacy by choosing partners who will not provide it (then not asking for it), or choosing casual sex (which inevitably messes with my head), or avoiding relationships altogether. I might be preoccupied, tbh, it's really difficult to tell because I'm pretty confusing to myself! I tend to feel insecure but I extremely, extremely rarely engage in any of the behaviours of the preoccupied person and even when I do it's very mild. The reason I went for fearful avoidant in the end is because everything I do is for self-preservation. I tend to visualise the ends of relationships over and over again in order to 'practice' the "correct" response (no emotion) and 'keep a check on myself' to ensure I don't get too emotionally close (fear of dependence)/get angry at myself when I feel something (viewing such things as a repulsive weakness in me).

What I'm doing, with a therapist, is to isolate the thoughts that lead to my behaviour and feelings and challenge them.

So, my thoughts are things like:
- I will always be alone
- Relationships are temporary
- Emotions are weak
- I will get hurt if I don't defend myself
- Other people are always disappointing
- You can't rely on anyone

You then just need to notice the thoughts when they come up and recognise they are part of a maladaptive coping style, so basically just observe it and think 'there's that thought again', instead of believing it to be true.

If you have trouble identifying your emotions and thoughts - I do until they get really extreme - Mindfulness can help.